http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
I have been The
New Republic's steward for nearly
28 years. And so I know quite a lot about its
history--the moments when it was bravely honest,
and the moments when it was thinly righteous.

The magazine has committed, at times, massive
errors of judgment. Its editors' commitment,
for example, to a mechanistic notion of industrial
efficiency and a simple-minded notion of equal
social outcomes led to an on-and-off-again dalliance
with communism. The more recent past has produced
other, if less momentous, moral errors.

But the other day I came across the August 25,
1941, issue, and a shiver of institutional pride
ran down my spine. The editorial--written fully
three and a half months before Pearl Harbor--was
titled, "For a Declaration of War." It began
on the cover and went on to argue for immediate
armed combat against the Axis powers.

At a time
when even those Americans sympathetic to the
Allies' cause were arguing that Washington should
do little more than send Britain old destroyers
and woolen socks, this was an unpopular position,
and an inspiring one. Reading the editorial
some 60 years later, one can see clearly how
grievously the United States erred in waiting
to be attacked before it deployed and fought.

Democracies are loath to admit that they provoke
zealous enemies. This is certainly true today,
as the Fourth Estate insists that despite the
palpable enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden across
the Muslim world (note recently The New York
Times reported that a classified poll of
educated Saudis between the ages of 25 and 41
showed that 95 percent of them supported bin
Laden's cause), modern Islam is overwhelmingly
tolerant and peaceful. Some people live by the
sword and others live by the word. Alas, many
of the latter in highbrow American journalism
live by the mendacious word or, at best, the
platitudinous one. They provide comforting assurances
of the universality of desire: Everybody wants
the same things, and if everybody had them there'd
be peace.

Consider, too, that the New York Times,
published Serge Schmemann's stunningly
patronizing review of What Went Wrong? Western
Impact and Middle Eastern Response, the
new book by the stunningly learned Princeton
professor Bernard Lewis. Schmemann objected
to the fact that the book is really "a compilation
of lectures and articles" from the last two
decades. Thus, it does not and cannot give what
the title implicitly promises: "convincing answers
to the riddles of September 11."

But for a scholar
like Lewis, September 11 did not raise many
fresh questions. After all, Lewis understood
the ideology behind the World Trade Center attack
before it happened. Bin Laden and his supporters
emerged organically from a living Islam that
Lewis has spent his life trying to interpret.
Schmemann takes exception to this "affirmation"
by Lewis: "By all the standards that matter
in the modern world--economic development and
job creation, literacy and educational and scientific
achievement, political freedom and respect for
human rights--what was once a mighty civilization
has indeed fallen low." Which of those excellences,
precisely, does Schmemann see in the Muslim
world? And if such a remark is controversial,
then on the basis of what more penetrating truth
can the Muslim world reform itself and improve
the lives of its people?

Schmemann's credential
for reviewing the Lewis book is that he spent
the mid-1990s as the Times' Jerusalem
bureau chief. He wasn't a notably hostile observer
of that country. But he saw--as did virtually
all his Times colleagues before and after
him--the confrontation between Israel and the
Palestinians as just another nasty encounter
between two peoples. Lewis understands that
it is embedded in a larger struggle: between
those who seek to resolve conflicts politically,
which means through compromise, and those who
seek to resolve conflicts through violence.

A cheeky friend of mine refers to NPR as "National
Palestine Radio." For NPR, this is not
just another nasty encounter between two peoples.
It is a tale of good and evil, the weak and
the strong, the largely innocent Palestinian
victims, and the aggressive and unmoving Israelis.
CAMERA (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle
East Reporting in America) last year published
a devastating report on NPRs coverage of the
conflict, and I am not surprised. You see, NPR's
foreign editor, the virulently anti-Israel Loren
Jenkins, has been on my radar for almost 20
years.

I wrote about him 18 years ago (May 16,
1983), after he'd won a Pulitzer for some Washington
Post articles he'd written on the Sabra
and Shatila massacres. That the Jews were entirely
to blame for Christians killing Muslims was
a widely supported, if wildly illogical, axiom
of the time. But Jenkins was after the specific
identity of the Christian killers and, in the
days following the massacres, he was quick to
fix primary blame on Major Saad Haddad, who
commanded an Israeli-backed force of between
1,000 to 1,500 Lebanese Christians.

Haddad's
forces, the Southern Lebanon Army (SLA), he
alleged, committed the atrocities in conjunction
with breakaway elements of the Maronite Catholic
militia, the Phalange. Jenkins reported that
the SLA had come from the South to invade the
camp. But an Israeli commission, quite severe
with Israel itself, showed that the SLA was
ensconced on the opposite bank of the Awali
River during the massacres. Jenkins eventually
acknowledged that Major Haddad played no role
in the massacres and it wasn't breakaway Phalange
who committed the murders, but its mainstream,
under the command of a young warlord named Elie
Hobeika.

(There were plenty of Shia in Hobeika's
militia as well, but that complicated the reporter's
story: Why would Muslims murder Palestinian
fellow Muslims?)

These two-decades-old memories flooded back
when I read a few days ago that Hobeika had
been killed by a car bomb in Beirut. This was
the kind of death he'd meted out routinely to
his enemies. His mother and 300 other mourners
wept at his church funeral. But his butchery
hadn't denied him entry into Lebanon's power
elite. He had spent the ensuing years as minister
of this and that in several Lebanese governments,
and at the end was part of the informal cabal
that actually ran the country for Syria (under
the careful watch of 25,000 of Bashar al-Assad's
troops).

Recently, I wrote about my trip ten years
ago to Saudi Arabia, and my impressions were
largely of hypocrisy. But there is one particular
hypocrisy that I failed to mention. The Saudi
ruling family does a lot of public worrying
about the Palestinians--last weekend in the
Times and The Washington Post it
once again berated the United States for not
sufficiently bowing to their needs and demands
(which it usually conflates).

So how many Palestinians
has it taken in? I asked my princely hosts.
Fifteen thousand, said one. Twenty-five thousand,
said another sternly. (This, in a country with
several million foreign workers.) Why so few?
I asked. "Because," said a third, "we don't
want too many Palestinians here. They are troublemakers.
We accept only those who have married Saudi
men and, of course, those we need--mostly teachers
and doctors." It was a disturbing revelation,
and an important one. And don't expect to hear
it on
NPR.

Martin Peretz
is editor-in-chief and chairman of The New Republic. Comment by clicking here.